Marla Hlady & Eric Chenaux – Fluff

marla-hlady-eric-chenaux-fluff-lp-avatar-quebecok

LP – Avatar Quebec

Fluff is produced by Avatar Quebec and is the latest outcome of a collaboration between multimedia artist Marla Hlady and guitarist, singer and composer Eric Chenaux. The duo works on experimentations defined as field-performance-recordings. The idea to improvise on field recordings is not particularly new, just as the border between sound art and music is no longer easy to define. The album is the result of a residence in Avatar in June 2017. Here, the two artists explored the acoustic and poetic properties of specific places, such as a gym or a forest. These weaves are followed by a free form and improvisational subtext, full of micro-percussion and the rarefied breaks of stringed instruments (for example in “Refuge Du Domaine De Gaspé 1”). In addition, there are some hypnotic, confused, noisy and rough sequences, whose structures are quite repetitive (in a following version of the track in the same space). “Patro Roc – Amadour” starts quite musically, like a group tuning up before playing, and then continues under the form of an extreme rarefied post-rock musical aria. Marla Hlady is currently an associate professor at the Department of Art, Culture and Media in the University of Toronto. Éric Chenaux is a musician whose career spans more than 25 years, with infinite collaborations and five solo albums produced by the label Constellation. In our opinion, Hlady is more at ease with what we might define as the “poetics of aesthetization of daily life”, while Chenaux develops his special technique, very laconic and essential, made by a slow and essential list of audible options. The locations of recordings were chosen this time without a specific stress on the symbolic characters of the spaces and mostly on the basis of their own specific acoustic properties: reverberation, echo and return noise. This asks us to sharpen our senses to another kind of tuning, focusing on common environmental features. Here, every surface reflects any audio emission: the two artists move and give us different impressions of the sounds and drive us to a different, extraordinary enjoyment.

 

Marla Hlady & Eric Chenaux – Fluff